This Article Full Text (PDF) Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to Saved Citations Download to citation manager Request Permissions Request Reprints Add to My Marked Citations Citing Articles Citing Articles via Scopus Google Scholar Articles by Olund, E. Social Bookmarking                         What's this?

Traffic in Souls: the ‘new woman,’ whiteness and mobile self-possession

Department of Geography, University of Sheffield, e.olund{at}sheffield.ac.uk

Traffic in Souls (Universal, 1913) inaugurated a spate of so-called white slave pictures at a time the US was experiencing a moral panic over prostitution. The film enacts a sexual and racial geography of the industrial city, one that is mobile and aleatory and requires a similarly mobile yet self-possessed subject to navigate it and its dangers successfully. Social reformers staffing the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures sought to steer the narrative outcome of the film toward a certain moral end, one that encouraged the production of a governmental subjectivity for its white, female spectators. This was a ‘constructive’ regulatory agenda toward sexuality through cinema that worked in tension with the more coercive statutory prohibition of prostitution, one that was thoroughly racialized through its exclusion of African Americans from concern.

Key Words: cinema • city • Progressive era • race • sexuality

Cultural Geographies, Vol. 16, No. 4, 485-504 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/1474474009340088


CiteULike    Complore    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter    What's this?